My weekly call-in on John DePetro’s WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM show, this week, was about new fees for beaches and parks, Mayor Hurricane signs on against climate change, and a mysterious personage in RIGOP circles.

A recent Providence Journal editorial highlights yet another indication that the administration of Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo isn’t exactly exhibiting a casual competence when it comes to the basic operations of state government. This time, the problem is the company with which the state has contracted to ensure that people in need are able to make it to their medical appointments, and the House Oversight Committee, led by Representative Patricia Serpa (D, West Warwick), is looking into it:

It has not escaped Ms. Serpa’s attention that there is a pattern of problems in state contracting. For many years, the executive branch has had trouble drafting strong contracts (without requiring an abundance of costly change orders), making sure services are properly implemented, and providing sufficient oversight once services have commenced. At the same time, the Raimondo administration has dramatically increased the number of public-relations people on its payroll.

Public-relations people on the payroll is just the start. Apparently, the governor also has plenty of time for things like this:

Gov. Gina Raimondo is all-in on a statewide bag ban and past opponents of the concept aren’t objecting.

Raimondo gave her support Feb. 14 at the final meeting of the Task Force to Tackle Plastics, an advisory board she created last July with the mission of cutting plastic pollution in the state.

That’s progressives (like socialists) for you: trying to save the world while letting those who rely on their competence for day-to-day operations suffer. The problem, at its bottom, is that people are willing to pay for certain services from government (for themselves and on behalf of others), but not so much for insider excesses and progressive schemes. So, to make way for the excesses and schemes, government has to scrimp on the things for which people are willing to pay so there’s money left over for the things for which they probably wouldn’t.

And at the end of the day, ensuring that the medical transportation vehicles run on time isn’t all that exciting.

If this is correct, it would seem that — whatever they may tell politicians and pollsters — many Rhode Islanders don’t actually believe in global warming when it comes to putting their own skin in the game:

“The price of any asset, be it commodities, gold, stocks, depends fundamentally on people’s beliefs,” said Lint Barrage, assistant professor of economics and environmental studies at Brown University. “If people are excessively optimistic about the future value of an asset, there is potential for mispricing, and bubbles and overinvestment.”

Speaking Friday at a one-day conference at Brown on the political and economic consequences of climate change, Barrage described her research on the coastal property market, which included going door-to-door in Rhode Island and interviewing homeowners about flood risk. People with homes in federally designated flood zones tended to underestimate the risk of flooding when compared with people who lived further inland, she found.

“The reason all this matters is that markets cannot price risks efficiently if people don’t believe in them,” she said.

And if the risks of climate change aren’t being accurately factored into prices now, then it could mean a steep drop in values somewhere down the line.

Of course, people’s beliefs and the decisions they make based on them are complicated. If a waterfront property is highly desirable and brings prestige right now, people may tend to discount the risk of owning it in the long term even if they fully believe that climate alarmists are not actually alarmists.

But then, on the other side of the ledger, one has to consider that — consciously or not — people assess risk to some extent on what they observe, rather than what they are told to expect. Thus, they may pick up on the fact that warnings about sea-level increases tend not to match our experience. They may also pick up on the fact that, when the alarmists try to present scary scenarios, they have to go way back in the past or project way out into the future.

In short, one can’t rule out the possibility that people are right to place these bets as they do.

Ocean State Current alumnus Kevin Mooney has an American Spectatorarticle highlighting Rhode Island’s role in the vanguard of the inside-government attack on the fossil fuel industry:

In 2018, Rhode Island became the first state to file climate change litigation against 21 fossil fuel producers, a move that directly assaults the free speech rights of those who dared to voice a dissenting opinion on climate policy.

Sheldon Whitehouse, the state’s Democratic U.S. senator, joined with Governor Gina Raimondo and Attorney General Peter Kilmartin to announce the suit at a press conference last July. Rhode Island’s litigation closely mirrors lawsuits that have been filed by 14 municipalities across the U.S.

Although climate change litigants have repeatedly failed to successfully make their case in court, state attorneys general persist in reloading the same arguments.

That’s just the beginning of the sordid tale of political showmanship and lawyers’ fees that makes up this abuse of power.

Instead of seeking to shape Rhode Island’s future with the proven ideals of a free-society, Governor Raimondo’s proposed 2019-2020 budget is a stunning departure from America’s core values and, instead, would put our state on a “Rhode to Serfdom.”

The Governor’s regressive budget points us 180 degrees in the opposite direction of where we need to head, and would stifle any opportunity for growth.

Statements of intention are important, of course, preliminary to action, but once some time has elapsed, what people do is much more important. Writing inUSA Today, Jon Gabriel argues that, by that principle, the United States cares much more about the environment than other members of the “international community”:

China was praised for signing on to the Paris Climate Agreement and in Argentina reaffirmed its commitment to controlling greenhouse gas emissions. Last year, however, China increased those emissions by 1.7 percent.

India, the fourth largest source for CO2, saw their emissions grow by 4.6 percent in 2017. Luckily for them, they too were praised for signing that “nonbinding communiqué.”

Overall, the European Union raised their CO2 output by 1.5 percent.

France, home of the Paris Agreement, is leading the diplomatic effort to save the planet. They increased their greenhouse gas emissions by 3.6 percent. …

From 2016 to 2017, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions decreased by 2.7 percent. Emissions from large power plants declined 4.5 percent since 2016, and nearly 20 percent since 2011. All without signing a piece of paper in Paris or Buenos Aires.

As Glenn Reynolds adds, “it’s almost as if” the environmentalists (who opposed fracking, a leading contributor to U.S. improvements) are “more interested in submission to a transnational bureaucracy than in results.” Americans should choose to continue with freedom, reason, and actual progress instead.

The problem of recycling solar energy panels has been in the news lately:

“The biggest issue is the misconception the recoverable materials are worth a lot,” [solar recycler Sam] Vanderhoof says. “We can pull out about 94 percent of the materials — but the market rate is $3.50 [per panel].” Most of that value is in silver. Vanderhoof thinks recycling costs could come down with scale, but the difficulty, he says, is “jump-starting the process.” Europe’s experience with mandating recycling with dedicated funding could be a guide.

A 2012 update to European Union electronics rules included specific regulations for solar panel recycling. As a result, EU countries have a more robust recycling program. This year, France opened what’s believed to be the first plant dedicated solely to recycling solar panels.

Vanderhoof would like to see a similar system set up in the U.S. “Like recycling here for cans and bottles,” he says. “Or if you go buy a new TV [in California], you pay upfront for the recycling.”

According to this expert working in the field, people should be paying into a recycling fund when they buy their panels. Right now, that isn’t happening, and panels are coming online in a large wave. That means somebody is going to have to cover that cost when it becomes a crisis — either the people who own the panels or everybody else. (Have you noticed how some of the rooftop solar companies say you get to keep the panels after 20 years?)

Which of those will be the case depends on whether solar energy companies can remain a fashionable and powerful political lobby. At the moment, we should just note how much of the cost of solar is not included in the price when people decide to deploy them.

Some years ago, back before it included two giant cooling towers, when I’d take that turn on Route 24 in Portsmouth that brings the Brayton Point power plant into view, I’d wonder how different it would feel if the structure in the distance were a medieval castle or something.

On the same stretch of highway, two separate wind turbines sit not far from the road, spinning away. As suburban novelties, they bring almost a country feel, as if a couple of farmers installed them on their copious land to supplement their energy. (Although, I’ll admit that driving through there at certain times of day is a little more unsettling than it used to be, because the flicker of the blades does spur a reaction.)

Reading Alex Kuffner’s Providence Journal article on proliferating turbines, along with the panic among local municipalities as solar companies swoop in more aggressively than expected, makes me wonder if we’ve really thought out how all of this fashionable renewable energy will change the character of Rhode Island:

The wind turbines appear up ahead as you drive west on Route 6, rising high on a hill over Johnston.

In a matter of weeks, Green Development, of North Kingstown, has installed six of the German-made behemoths that each stand 524 feet tall when their blade tips are at their highest point — higher than the Industrial Trust building in Providence.

They aren’t buildings, of course, but that’s essentially a few city blocks worth of whirling skyscrapers. Add in the replacement of forested areas with fields of black solar panels, and the Ocean State will start to feel very different.

We should probably start thinking about that. After all, we’re not only tolerating the change, we’re subsidizing it heavily through our taxes and our electric rates.

Here’s another narrative-disrupting bit of information, this one from Michael Bastasch on The Daily Caller:

Greenhouse gas emissions continued to plummet during President Donald Trump’s first year in office, according to new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data.

Based on data from more than 8,000 large facilities, EPA found greenhouse gas emissions, mostly carbon dioxide, fell 2.7 percent from 2016 to 2017. Emissions from large power plants fell 4.5 percent from 2016 levels, according to EPA. …

Earlier this year, the Energy Information Administration reported that per-capita greenhouse gas emissions hit a 67-year low during Trump’s first year in office. …

[Meanwhile,] EPA’s new data follows news that, globally, greenhouse gas emissions are set to rise to historic highs by the end of the year, despite nearly 200 countries signing the Paris climate accord. Global greenhouse gas emissions also rose in 2017.

On the other side of all those questions about how much warming we should expect and who or what is causing it lies a whole ‘nother series of questions about how best to address it. I’ve long been of the opinion that economic and technological progress is the only way forward.

If we’re really only 12 years from a point of no return that could only be averted by the impossible decision of the people of the planet to hand over their freedom to a group of unaccountable global elites, then the only way out really is through. Set a reduction in fossil fuels as a goal — a good thing — and then step back. Bureaucrats are neither well positioned nor vested with the ideal incentives to understand what will achieve the end and what won’t.

This is another area in which, it seems to me, the constant need of progressives to filter everything through government is harmful even to their own ends (to the extent that they have ends other than the accumulation of power).

An essay on NRO by Oren Cass is worth a read for the broad-ranging illustration it provides of the state of politicized science these days. His opening vignette is perfect:

The president of the United States had just cited his work with approval during a Rose Garden speech announcing a major change in American policy, and MIT economist John Reilly was speaking with National Public Radio. “I’m so sorry,” said host Barbara Howard. “Yeah,” Reilly replied.

This was not a triumph but a tragedy, because the president in question was Donald Trump. And the action taken was withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate agreement.

Trump had cited Reilly’s work correctly, saying: “Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full” using Reilly’s economic projections, “. . . it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree . . . Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100.” But as Reilly explained on NPR, “All of us here believe the Paris agreement was an important step forward, so, to have our work used as an excuse to withdraw it is exactly the reverse of what we imagined hoping it would do.”

In other words, this isn’t about science, but about belief, and in this view, science is supposed to find evidence confirming progressive assumptions. That’s what it means to “believe in science.”

As Cass elaborates, this is especially a problem for people who profess to believe in data-driven public policy. If their data starts to raise doubts about their policies, and rather than adjust the policies, they look for new data, the whole thing begins to seem a bit like a scam. More from Cass:

Some check is needed on the impulse to slice and dice whatever results the research might yield into whatever conclusion the research community “imagined hoping” it would reach. In theory, peer review should do just that. But in this respect, the leftward lean of the ivory tower is as problematic for its distortion of the knowledge that feeds public-policy debates as it is for its suffocating effect on students and the broader culture. Peer review changes from feature to bug when the peers form an echo chamber of like-minded individuals pursuing the same ends. Academic journals become talking-points memos when they time the publication of unreviewed commentaries for maximum im­pact on political debates.

WPRI reporter Tim White tweeted that this New York Times article about the United Nations’ accelerated doom-saying about climate change is “truly terrifying.” My response was to ask if this section (emphasis added) doesn’t set off his alarm bells:

Avoiding the most serious damage requires transforming the world economy within just a few years, said the authors, who estimate that the damage would come at a cost of $54 trillion. But while they conclude that it is technically possible to achieve the rapid changes required to avoid 2.7 degrees of warming, they concede that it may be politically unlikely.

Look, one needn’t be a climate change skeptic to acknowledge the layers of assumptions that go into these scary warnings. First, one must ignore the lack of warming over the last two decades and assume that the models will be more accurate going forward. Then, one must assume that the change really does derive from human activity and that it’s possible to avert the worst. Then, another wave assumptions comes with predictions about the effect on weather, creating soaking rains where that will be harmful and droughts where that would be harmful, all coming together in a way that doesn’t equalize the effects (by, for example, simply moving where farming must be done). Add in the effect of technology and changes in energy production that have made the United States a leader in CO2 reduction. And don’t forget that one must balance the estimated $54 trillion in costs from warming against whatever the cost would be to rework our economy — including an assessment of the people who bear those costs.

Put that all on a scale that pivots on the promise that giving more power to the people who brought the warning, and a tempered reaction to the terror is justified.

Deepwater Wind says it’ll expand in the coming years, making Providence and Boston the two major hubs of the company’s U.S. offshore wind activities.

The time line goes like this: To his shame, Republican Governor Donald Carcieri guaranteed long-term profits for a green energy company run by his former chief of staff. Earlier this year, Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo surprised Rhode Island by announcing a secret deal to guarantee the company more profits (and then immediately began fundraising off it).

Now the company’s owners have sold it off to ∅rsted, no doubt at tremendous personal profit. There’s a reason CEO Jeffrey Grybowski hands out about $4,000 per year to key decision-makers in government, with Gina Raimondo taking the lead since 2010, at $6,300 total. So far this year, Grybowski has given the max to Raimondo, Democrat Aaron Regunberg, Republican Allan Fung, and Republican Patricia Morgan — hedging his bets, it would seem.

Rhode Islanders should push back against these gambles. If companies from anywhere in the world can make make a profit in Rhode Island while offering its people something for which they are willing to pay, then we should welcome them for that mutually beneficial exchange. But when our political overlords force us to guarantee profits, the benefits are always imbalanced toward connected insiders.

Courtesy of EcoRI, here’s an interesting take on a Tiverton farm that is apparently soon to become a solar power plant:

The 72-acre farm is filled with history and habitat. Thousands of trees, a pond alive with frogs, an 18th-century farmhouse, and the grave of an American Revolutionary War soldier are among the property’s many treasures, buried or otherwise.

Julie Munafo’s family has owned Wingover Farm since 1970s, but a pending sale could lead to the destruction of more Rhode Island open space — another act in a growing pattern that sacrifices natural resources for energy production.

The state — thanks to generous economic incentives that are energizing shortsighted development — is paying for the rampant expansion of its renewable-energy portfolio, mostly ground-mounted solar panels, with forests and farmland.

The interesting part is that an environmentalist publication is using a notably contra-government tone in favor of preserving the open space. The only semblance of an answer mentioned in Frank Carini’s article is for people to attend meetings to help figure out better rules for placing solar farms, but that is insufficient on its face. The problem will remain that (at the behest of environmentalists) the government has created financial incentive for solar farms. Making it more difficult to site them will only raise the cost, which is just another way to lower the subsidy.

Eliminating the subsidies altogether would be a better option. The progressive complaint against free-market solutions is that they give people or groups with money an advantage, but progressive solutions that leverage government give people or groups with power an advantage (and, of course, money is one source of power). At least in the free market, people with money are competing with other people with money.

Happily, those with more-material intentions will be the most keen to make sure their investments are well placed and efficient, while those with more-altruistic intentions will have an edge in projects that have a moral or aesthetic angle. A nostalgic family looking to offload a farm, for instance, might sell it for less to developer who plans to sacrifice profit for preservation.

One needn’t agree with everything a climate change skeptic says to observe something conspicuous from the alarmist side. They rarely treat the question of climate change as an issue with unfortunate trade-offs, as Byorn Lomborg does in an essay for the New York Post:

Activist organizations like Worldwatch argue that higher temperatures will make more people hungry, so drastic carbon cuts are needed. But a comprehensive new study published in Nature Climate Change led by researchers from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis has found that strong global climate action would cause far more hunger and food insecurity than climate change itself.

The scientists used eight global-agricultural models to analyze various scenarios between now and 2050. These models suggest, on average, that climate change could put an extra 24 million people at risk of hunger. But a global carbon tax would increase food prices and push 78 million more people into risk of hunger. The areas expected to be most vulnerable are sub-Saharan Africa and India.

Indeed, the attitude of alarmists is pretty good evidence that their solutions come before their reason for them, because the depth of analysis is lacking. A promotional interview of progressive candidate for lieutenant governor Aaron Regunberg that Rhode Island Public Radio (RIPR) misleadingly presents as a “debate” contains a good example.

Regunberg pitches the move to reduce the flow of traditional energy into the state as a good economic trade-off. Imported fuel sends our energy dollars out of state, he says, while home-grown green energy production keeps energy dollars here. Even without going into the ways in which modern companies are constructed (with supply lines crossing many borders), we can observe Regunberg’s lack of economic depth.

If imported traditional energy is (let’s just say) half the cost of local green energy, it is a cold comfort to local residents that they’re spending twice as much on energy, but with the extra going people who happen to share their state. On the commercial side, local businesses could reinvest that money in themselves. In both cases, all of the extra money going into the local green machine is coming out of the local economy anyway.

As with Regunberg’s claims about single-payer health care, progressives insist that their policies are 100% upside and the only reason to disagree is some sort of hatred or greed. On its face, that’s foolish.

Some politicians have been critical of National Grid for a proposed 19 percent increase in the electric bill for the typical residential user starting Oct. 1. It’s a frightening number, to be sure. The irony is, politicians have a greater influence over that number than the energy distribution company.

The proposed 19 percent — painful to Rhode Islanders and their economy, if approved by the state — is not a profit center for National Grid. It is the pass-through cost of energy. It gains the company nothing other than angry customers.

Of course, the utility doesn’t have to worry but so much about angering customers, given that it is a monopolistic utility. But the key point is spot on: Every year, politicians layer on new regulations that make energy more expensive and cave to activists who wish to prevent the development of any traditional energy sources. As they drive up the price, it is that much easier to whip up anger at the messenger.

If one is inclined to ponder cui bono, this is an excellent topic. And as the editorial notes, if one is inclined to ponder who doesn’t benefit, the answer is all of us.

A commentary piece by Jason Hayes appearing in the Wall Street Journal last month provides an example of progressives’ not really caring about the influence of “millionaires and billionaires,” provided it’s in their favor:

Michigan’s two largest electricity companies struck a “breakthrough agreement” last month with billionaire California environmentalist Tom Steyer to boost the Wolverine State’s clean-energy requirements. Earlier this year, Mr. Steyer had funded a ballot initiative slated for August to force Michigan’s electricity providers to source 30% of their overall sales from renewable options such as wind and solar by 2030. But under the new agreement, the utilities will aim to produce a minimum 25% of their energy from renewable sources and a further 25% from energy-efficiency measures by that same year. This 50% green-energy goal will effectively govern the state’s energy policy for at least the next decade.

News of the deal between Mr. Steyer and the utilities— DTE Energy and Consumers Energy—has left many in Michigan wondering what happened to the established process for setting energy policy. The deal hasn’t been approved by state officials or voters. How is it possible that two utilities and a single special-interest group can independently agree to raise the state’s renewable energy mandate and get away with it?

Had the Koch Brothers made some arrangement with a state’s electric utilities to take up some policy that would have increased the costs of energy, progressives would have made it the subject of weeks of national outrage. But here’s the key point: Most conservatives would have joined them.

As Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo spins Rhode Island’s economic numbers and the news media touts her “wooing” of blockchain companies, an article from the Newport Daily News a couple of weeks ago hasn’t gotten much attention:

Hodges Badge Co. Inc. has made the “difficult decision” to close its Portsmouth plant this November and consolidate production at its Washington, Missouri, facility, according to a company statement.

“Hodges Badge Company Inc. is a 98-year-old family-owned company and we consider each one of our employees as part of our extended family,” according to the statement attributed to Rick Hodges, the company president and CEO. “We greatly appreciate being part of the Portsmouth community and are truly grateful to all the employees who contributed to our success over the past several decades. This is a necessary and critical economic decision that we do not take lightly, and we will be working with each of our employees to provide compensation packages and on-site outplacement services.”

The facility in Portsmouth opened in 1974 and employs around 92 people. Rhode Island just won’t allow the company to justify keeping those jobs here.

To be sure, that’s not only a tax and regulation issue. For Hodges Badge, energy played a big role, too:

Despite other business reforms aimed at reducing electricity costs, the plant still consumed 451,000 kilowatts of power for all of 2008 at a cost of $91,000, according to a Daily News article in July 2009. That was twice as much as the company paid to power its Missouri plant.

“I live here and I love it here, but how long can you realistically sustain that?” Rick Hodges said at that time.

Imagine how the current political landscape looks from that perspective. The governor is touting more crony wind deals; NIMBYism is hindering an effort to increase power production in the state; and schemes to make energy more expensive through carbon taxing are a regular feature of every legislative session and may explode into law any year.

Rick Hodges was vocally against the toll on the Sakonnet River Bridge, and it can’t have been lost on him that tolls are proliferating in the state and could return at any time. Add in the recent mandatory-sick-leave law and the push for extremely radical “equal pay” legislation. At some point, business owners must tire of always feeling vulnerable. Any given legislative session could be the end of their operations for some money grab or progressive identity politics impulse.

Glenn Reynolds sure does summarize the impression many of us have when we come across information like the United States’ having hit a seven-decade low, per capita, in carbon dioxide emissions, falling in absolute terms even as the rest of the world increases. Writes Reynolds:

It doesn’t count if you get this result without expanding governmental power.

But it should. Two problems arise, though. The first is that, obviously, people who want to seize power through centralized government will look for reasons to do so, whether a foreign adversary, moral decay, or a changing environment. A second is less blameworthy: We tend to feel as if a problem has not been addressed unless somebody has addressed it. If the problem seems to improve naturally, then that’s just the way it happened.

A challenge for conservative generally is that our proposed solutions most often have an element of letting problems fix themselves with a minimal nudge from us.

Valley Breeze publisher Tom Ward has an important warning related to the latest government-backed wind project in Rhode Island:

I’m OK with wind turbines miles offshore. But when the May 31 Journal story ran out of political high-fives and got to the end, it came to our daily reality. Wrote Alex Kuffner, “The price of power from the Revolution project is still uncertain.” Its cousin, the Block Island Wind Farm, “will ultimately cost ratepayers (that’s us!) hundreds of millions of dollars in above-market costs.”

One day later, an opinion column also appeared in the Journal, by Meredith Angwin, of Vermont, a physical chemistry researcher and pro-nuclear power advocate. The headline: “We’ll lose power in the winters ahead.” In it, she detailed the now well-known facts surrounding the coming closing of many of New England’s traditional electric plants. …

What I know with 100 percent certainly is this: If in eight years rolling blackouts come to New England during the winter, families who live here will have been put in danger by radical environmentalism and the politicians who practice that religion. Short-sighted decisions from a decade earlier will come home to roost as energy costs explode, children shiver, schools close, and businesses grind to a halt. Those who caused the problem will be long gone. Reasoned people need to demand predictable power today.

In too many areas, across too many levels of government, we’re simply failing to take the future into account. The incentives of big government all but ensure that this will be so. Our government is very skeptical about the goodness of people and our ability to guide our own lives, but it ought to be skeptical of its own ability to micromanage the universe.

Look to any socialist country to see what happens when the predictable consequences of big-government policies come to pass: They scapegoat the people who are trying to keep things going, nonetheless, particularly those in industry, perpetuating a cycle. We can already see the beginnings of this process with all of the ideological legislation that treats business owners as if they are morally suspicious characters.

Something feels both odd and not quite right about the fact that Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo is sending out fundraising appeals saying that “Gina can’t see this [new off-shore wind] project through without your support.” So, if I give Raimondo the requested $10, is that going to keep her political career alive or is it going to facilitate a green energy project? Should the governor be committing the state to long-term agreements with a private sector company that require the same governor to be reelected?

The whole thing is deeply strange. A week ago, the Providence Journal announced that Rhode Island had “selected” Deepwater Wind to build a massive off-shore wind farm, but most Rhode Islanders probably didn’t even know we were even looking into the possibility. As Alex Kuffner reports:

Although it was a Massachusetts process, a little-known clause in the the procurement rules allowed other states in the region to join in if they wanted to. Without making its intentions known publicly, Rhode Island acted on the clause.

Even Deepwater CEO Jeffrey Grybowski seemed surprised.

When last we heard about Deepwater’s “Revolution Wind” project, the company was promising all its jobs and economic development to the New Bedford area. It looks like Massachusetts chose a different company, but Rhode Island was happy to take seconds.

Ideological disagreement with the governor aside, something just seems off about this whole thing. A secret deal with a connected company materializes at the nth hour, and the governor starts fundraising off it immediately. Forgive my cynicism, but it seems like more media attention might flow to this subject if it weren’t a Democrat governor and a fashionable “green energy” project.

I wouldn’t claim that I help this curve much, but it certainly has the ring of truth:

Do our behaviors really reflect our beliefs? New research suggests that, when it comes to climate change, the answer is no. And that goes for both skeptics and believers.

Participants in a year-long study who doubted the scientific consensus on the issue “opposed policy solutions,” but at the same time, they “were most likely to report engaging in individual-level, pro-environmental behaviors,” writes a research team led by University of Michigan psychologist Michael Hall.

Conversely, those who expressed the greatest belief in, and concern about, the warming environment “were most supportive of government climate policies, but least likely to report individual-level actions.”

This applies to other issues, like charity. Big-government types who want to use tax dollars to solve every problem sometimes behave as if that’s their contribution, so they don’t have to use any of their own money additionally.

The central consideration, here, is probably that concern about an issue is a different thing from agreement with a certain approach to solving the problem (especially in the balance of other issues), and “conservatives” tend to be more comfortable with this distinction. The lesson of the above findings may not be that self-identified environmentalists are more likely to be hypocrites, but that people who are willing to take individual action are more likely to see that as a solution.

I do think, though, that there’s something to the idea of “moral licensing”:

Previous research has found doing something altruistic—even buying organic foods—gives us license to engage in selfish activity. We’ve “earned” points in our own mind. So if you’ve pledged some money to Greenpeace, you feel entitled to enjoying the convenience of a plastic bag.

In that spirit, let me offer Sen. Whitehouse some new ideas. First, stop calling people names. Reading the senator’s speeches, it is all too easy to find people referred to as “thugs,” “liars,” “flunkies,” and “stooges.” He has said “The fossil fuel industry, on the other hand, is neither honest nor decent.” Accusations like this make for good political theater – which might be the senator’s real purpose – but they don’t make for good discussions.

Second, end the hyperbole. As an example, in the Roll Call article, Sen. Whitehouse claims that “he sees weekly full-page ads in his local paper for services to protect homes from rising seas.” If the senator’s local paper is The Daily News, I have to say that I have never seen weekly full-page ads for such services. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration prediction for Newport of a rise of 0.9 feet over 100 years might explain the lack of ads.

Third, rethink the “fossil fuel industry controls everyone” idea. …

One suspects Professor Sheehan is correct that political theater is more the Senator’s objective than actual action, which explains why he would persist with his hundreds of “Wake Up” speeches despite finding that they have little practical effect.

In late summer 2016, I looked into the state government’s program, then under development, to purchase farmland and distribute it to small-time farmers (see here and here). Well, Jennifer McDermott reports for the Associated Press that the program is now getting underway, emphasizing that the “entrepreneurial” farmers can buy the property for about one-fifth of what the state pays.

The National Farmers Union knows of no other state that buys farmland to sell to farmers at less than market price. Other states give tax credits and loans to beginning farmers.

Though some critics say this is not the role of state government, Rhode Island sees it as a way to keep young entrepreneurs from moving to other states, where land may be cheaper. It also could attract other farmers to the state, though retaining farmers who already are here is the main goal and the selection process favors Rhode Island farmers.

These points don’t make sense. If other states don’t offer these benefits, farmers won’t find much-cheaper land for quite some distance, creating a pretty high barrier in order to up and leave.

More importantly, allocating resources to this activity — not only in the purchase price, but in the effect of preventing more-efficient usage of the land — implicitly makes somebody else’s activity more difficult. On the hill down which excrement rolls, that “somebody” is more likely to be some other variation of entrepreneur trying to scrape resources together.

To keep the boutique farmer, in other words the state government may ultimately (although invisibly) be dismissing the office-based innovator with some hot technology of the future. Given the geography and soil of the area, such a trade means playing to the Ocean State’s weaknesses, not its strengths.

And farmers aside, which Rhode Islanders does this policy benefit? I’d suggest that the answer is relatively wealthy people who like the aesthetics of having nearby farms and purchasing local produce. Those are aesthetics that I share, but our community (and economy) would be much better served by having it expressed in actual prices for produce. Subsidizing local farms to keep the prices down creates higher prices for something we can’t see.

Remember when Rhode Island helped get Deepwater Wind off the ground by forcing Rhode Island energy users to pay an artificially high price for its product, in the name of making the Ocean State “the Saudi Arabia of wind”? We were supposedly taking the lead in an industry of the future and securing the “well-paying jobs” that Rhode Islanders deserved.

Well, at least we can say we kicked off a job bump in the larger region:

Deepwater Wind will assemble the wind turbine foundations for its Revolution Wind in Massachusetts, and it has identified three South Coast cities – New Bedford, Fall River and Somerset – as possible locations for this major fabrication activity, the company is announcing today. …

These commitments are in addition to Deepwater Wind’s previously announced plans to use the New BEdford Marine Commerce Terminal for significant construction and staging operations, and to pay $500,000 per year to the New Bedford Port Authority to use the facility.”

Businesses will go where it is in their immediate interest to go. That’s just what the incentives dictate. Rhode Island continues to attempt to use crony capitalism in order to avoid making the changes necessary to be a place that businesses find attractive without special incentives. That will ultimately fail, because it drives away all businesses that do not receive the special deals, and it keeps those that do only as long as the subsidies keep coming… and aren’t exceeded by somebody else’s deal.

But improving Rhode Island’s business environment inherently requires reform of and risk to the insider system that has corrupted the state, so it’s not a realistic option.

Here’s an interesting alternative view to the usual alarmism about the climate. Manhattan Institute Senior Scholar Oren Cass looks at a few studies with implausible conclusions. One predicts Iceland and Mongolia as future economic powerhouses. Here’s another interesting finding from a government agency:

One Environmental Protection Agency study estimates the potential increase in extreme-temperature deaths by looking at city-specific effects. It assumes that a day counting as unusually hot for some city in 2000 will cause a similar mortality increase in that city in 2100, even if climate change makes it no longer unusual.

The result is a projection that a hot day will kill massive numbers in Northern cities by 2100—though such temperatures are already routine at lower latitudes with no such ill effects. Pittsburgh’s extreme-temperature mortality rate is supposed to be 75 times as high in 2100 as that of Phoenix in 2000, though Pittsburgh will not be as hot then as Phoenix was a century earlier.

But if Pittsburgh’s climate steadily warms over the coming century, it will not react to a 100-degree day in 2100 the same way it did in 2000. Even if it didn’t warm, we should assume that economic and technological advancement will make the city and its residents more resilient to heat than they are today.

The absence of this sort of discussion is what makes many of us skeptical of alarmism. There are many steps between “the planet is warming” and “you have to restrain your economy and give up your freedom,” but we’re typically told that there’s no time for all that stuff.

Is it just me, or does this sound like the sort of thing that Hollywood would put in the mouth of an unsophisticated rube standing in the way of progress?

“Our climate crisis is at such an advanced point that we can’t be developing new fossil fuel resources, especially in one of the wealthiest countries in the world that has the largest historical responsibility for causing climate change,” said nationally-known climate activist Tim DeChristopher, of Pawtucket. “All of our oil and gas needs to be kept in the ground and here in Rhode Island we’re going to make sure that happens.”

The logical fallacies and just plain thinking are bad enough. The stage of climate change is an independent variable from developing new fossil fuels. Indeed, at a certain point, it might be too late to stop calamity, meaning that the only way forward is rapid technological advancement powered by cheap fuel.

Similarly, the wealth of a nation has little bearing on its right to harvest fuel. Indeed, environmentalists should account for the probability that the United States will extract fuel in a relatively environmentally friendly way, and with its produce driving down the price of fossil fuels worldwide, there is less incentive for the world’s truly bad actors to join the market.

But punctuating all DeChristopher’s bad thinking is this Luddite notion that the fuel must stay in the ground. Does the superstitious bubba believe that Gaia will lash out in anger, like the goddess of nature in Disney’s Moana?